89 research outputs found

    Parental Rights vs. Best Interests of the Child: A False Dichotomy in the Context of Adoption

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    I. Introduction: Identifying the Controversy The mythology of adoption involves a scenario in which a teenage girl gets pregnant, and neither she nor the father is ready to raise a child. Upon birth, these young parents voluntarily relinquish the baby to an upwardly mobile couple who have been waiting years to adopt. The adoptive parents become, in essence, the birth parents to the baby who grows up happy and well-adjusted. The birth parents vanish from the picture, perhaps eventually marrying and having additional children. No one looks back. But what happens to this myth when the birth mother changes her mind or misidentifies the father, when the adoptee is not a baby but a ten-year-old foster child, when the adoptive parents abuse the child, when the adoptive parents are the baby\u27s grandparents, or when the adoptee begins asking questions about her family of origin? If ever the reality of adoption fit this myth, it certainly does not today. Adoption, as with every issue involving families, is much more complicated and diverse than the above scenario suggests. Indeed, most adoptions do not even involve infants, but instead concern older children who have lived with multiple families. 1 Moreover, it is now widely recognized that even children adopted as infants do not have just one family, but are always physically and existentially related to their birth families. 2 It is against this backdrop of contemporary adoption that courts are increasingly being called upon to resolve contested adoptions involving competing adults. ..

    Journeys in the Palimpsest : British women's travel to Greece,1840-1914

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    Discussions of British travel to Greece in the nineteenth century have been dominated by the work of Lord Byron. Byron’s contemporary Greeks were Orientalised, while antique Greece was personified as a captive Greek woman on the brink of compromise by the Ottomans, or a cadaver. Throughout the nineteenth century this antique vista was employed by the tourist industry. This thesis offers a consideration of the visions and vistas of Greece encountered by British women who travelled to Greece in the subsequent years, especially in the light of how commercial tourism limited or constructed their access to Greece. Commercial tourist structures were in place in Athens and other major sites of antiquity, but the majority of the women considered here travelled through a terrain that went beyond a narrow and museum staged experience of Greece. Three paradigms have been established for women travelling in Greece: the professional archaeologist, the ethnographer, and the tourist. The women archaeologist combated the patriarchal domination of the classics, not only to posit a female intellectual who could master Greece, but also reveal how antique Greece was used to underwrite patriarchal British ideologies. The ethnographers in Greece are a mixed collection of semi-professional and professional ethnographers, considered alongside more conventional travel narratives, all of which offer discussions of the modern Greek psyche trapped at a series of liminal fissures (East/West, antique/modern). Concentrating on women and geography, they subtly conflate the two to read nation in gender. However, without the sexualised aspect of their male counterparts, they read Greek women through a series of diverse practices that they identify through a close contact that could only be established between women. The modern tourist in Greece offers the most enduring and lasting type of traveller in Greece. Travelling with and against guidebooks, the discussion considers the visual technologies that helped to codify the way Greece is still seen as a tourist destination. In conjunction with this, the popular discourses denigrating women’s travel are also discussed, which offers a key reason for the dismissal of their literary output.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

    Prolonged energy harvesting for ingestible devices

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    Ingestible electronics have revolutionized the standard of care for a variety of health conditions. Extending the capacity and safety of these devices, and reducing the costs of powering them, could enable broad deployment of prolonged-monitoring systems for patients. Although previous biocompatible power-harvesting systems for in vivo use have demonstrated short (minute-long) bursts of power from the stomach, little is known about the potential for powering electronics in the longer term and throughout the gastrointestinal tract. Here, we report the design and operation of an energy-harvesting galvanic cell for continuous in vivo temperature sensing and wireless communication. The device delivered an average power of 0.23 μW mm⁻² of electrode area for an average of 6.1 days of temperature measurements in the gastrointestinal tract of pigs. This power-harvesting cell could provide power to the next generation of ingestible electronic devices for prolonged periods of time inside the gastrointestinal tract.National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (Grant EB-000244

    Biohybrid systems for environmental intelligence on living plants: WatchPlant project

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    [EN] New challenges such as climate change and sustainability arise in society influencing not only environmental issues but human's health directly. To face these new challenges IT technologies and their application to environmental intelligent monitoring become into a powerful tool to set new policies and blueprints to contribute to social good. In the new H2020 project, WatchPlant will provide new tools for environmental intelligence monitoring by the use of plants as "well-being" sensors of the environment they inhabit. This will be possible by equipping plants with a net of communicated wireless self-powered sensors, coupled with artificial intelligence (AI) to become plants into "biohybrid organisms" to test exposure-effects links between plant and the environment. It will become plants into a new tool to be aware of the environment status in a very early stage towards in-situ monitoring. Additionally, the system is devoted to be sustainable and energy-efficient thanks to the use of clean energy sources such as solar cells and a enzymatic biofuel cell (BFC) together with its self-deployment, self-awareness, adaptation, artificial evolution and the AI capabilities. In this concept paper, WatchPlant will envision how to face this challenge by joining interdisciplinary efforts to access the plant sap for energy harvesting and sensing purposes and become plants into "biohybrid organisms" to benefit social good in terms of environmental monitoring in urban scenarios.Project WatchPlant has received funding from the European Union¿s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the FET grant agreement, no. 101017899.García-Carmona, L.; Bogdan, S.; Diaz-Espejo, A.; Dobielewski, M.; Hamann, H.; Hernandez-Santana, V.; Kernbach, A.... (2021). Biohybrid systems for environmental intelligence on living plants: WatchPlant project. Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). 210-215. https://doi.org/10.1145/3462203.347588521021
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